The Iraq War was a mistake. Letting Iran get nukes would be worse.

We already learned what happens when the international community waits too long to prevent an absurdly hostile regime from getting nuclear weapons. Just ask North Korea.

A statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in Baghdad after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (photo: U.S. Department of Defense/Wikipedia)

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Nearly every successful entrepreneur on this planet will tell you that their success is built on the rubble of previous failures. Each venture that collapsed, each idea that didn’t work, and each decision that proved wrong left behind something valuable: information. Failure, in that sense, is rarely wasted. It becomes the raw material for better judgment the next time.

As the entrepreneur Seth Godin often says, “The person who fails the most wins.”

The idea is not that failure itself is desirable. The idea is that failure, when paired with reflection and adjustment, becomes the most efficient teacher available. Entrepreneurs who survive long enough to succeed are rarely those who avoided mistakes entirely. They are the ones who learned the fastest from them.

This principle extends far beyond business. Parents make mistakes and adjust. Athletes lose games and refine their approach. Negotiators misjudge situations and improve their instincts over time. In every domain where human beings strive to accomplish difficult things, the same principle applies: Experience produces wisdom, but only if people are willing to learn from it.

Refusing to act because of past mistakes would make progress impossible. No athlete would ever compete again after losing a championship. No entrepreneur would launch another venture after one failed company. No parent would give up after a difficult year raising a child.

At the same time, blindly repeating the same strategy while expecting a different outcome is equally irrational.

But those are not the only two options. The real path forward — the one that produces progress — is the third option: learning from mistakes and applying those lessons moving forward.

This is why it is so puzzling to hear many critics oppose confronting the Islamic Republic of Iran on the grounds that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan two decades ago were mistakes.

Even if one accepts that those wars contained serious strategic errors, that does not logically lead to the conclusion that every future confrontation with a hostile regime must therefore be avoided. That reasoning misunderstands how learning works, whether in business, relationships, or geopolitics.

The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan were never meant to be “never confront dangerous regimes again.” The real lessons are far more specific. Large-scale nation-building is extraordinarily difficult. Long-term military occupations are politically and financially costly. Military power alone cannot transform complex societies. Those are real lessons, but they do not imply that dangerous regimes should simply be ignored while they pursue weapons capable of catastrophic destruction.

In fact, the comparison between Iraq in 2003 and Iran today highlights just how different the circumstances are. The central controversy surrounding the Iraq War revolved around the presumption that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction which were ultimately never found. Intelligence assessments turned out to be flawed, and the credibility of Western governments suffered as a result.

The Islamic Republic of Iran presents a fundamentally different situation. In recent negotiations with the United States, Iranian officials openly acknowledged possessing large quantities of highly enriched uranium. According to U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, Iranian negotiators stated directly that they control approximately 460 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity.

This is not a minor technical detail. Uranium enriched to 60 percent is already far beyond what is necessary for civilian nuclear energy or medical purposes. Weapons-grade uranium typically requires enrichment to around 90 percent, and experts note that material already enriched to 60 percent can be further enriched to weapons-grade in roughly a week, perhaps 10 days at most. Even uranium enriched to 20 percent can be refined to weapons-grade within a matter of weeks. In other words, the most difficult step in nuclear weapons development — reaching high enrichment levels — is already largely behind them.

What makes the situation even more striking is that Iranian negotiators reportedly described this capability openly and without hesitation. They expressed pride in having evaded international oversight mechanisms to reach these enrichment levels. At the same time, they insisted that their “inalienable right” to enrich uranium must be the starting point of any negotiations. This framing exposes the core contradiction in Iran’s longstanding claim that its nuclear program exists solely for civilian purposes.

Civilian nuclear programs do not require uranium enriched to 60 percent. Medical isotope production does not require enrichment facilities buried 70 feet underground and fortified to the brink. If the nuclear program were truly about civilian or medical purposes, why construct enrichment facilities so deep underground and so heavily protected from military attacks?

The explanation often offered by Iran’s leadership is “national pride.” But enrichment at these levels serves only one meaningful strategic purpose: the ability to rapidly produce nuclear weapons. And the implications of a nuclear-armed Iran extend far beyond the existence of the weapons themselves.

The most obvious danger is direct use. Iran’s leadership has spent decades embedding hostility toward Israel, the United States, and the broader West into its ideological foundation. A regime that regularly chants “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” cannot simply be evaluated through the same assumptions applied to stable nuclear powers that developed doctrines of deterrence over decades.

But direct use is not the only concern. Iran operates the largest proxy warfare network in the Middle East. Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq, the Assad regime’s allies in Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza and the West Bank all operate within Iran’s hegemonic orbit.

A nuclear Iran could potentially transfer nuclear materials or weapons technology to proxy organizations. Even if the probability were small, the mere possibility would represent one of the most dangerous proliferation risks in modern history. Traditional nuclear deterrence assumes that states fear retaliation. Proxy warfare introduces ambiguity, deniability, and instability into that equation.

There is also the threat of nuclear blackmail, which occurs when a state uses its nuclear capability to shield aggressive behavior and deter outside intervention. Once a regime possesses nuclear weapons, it can threaten catastrophic escalation if its adversaries attempt to counter its nefarious activities.

The result is a kind of strategic protection racket. Under the umbrella of nuclear deterrence, a state can expand its aggression, sponsor militias, disrupt trade routes, and intimidate neighbors — while calculating that other powers will hesitate to respond forcefully for fear of escalation.

Even worse, Iran’s nuclearization would not occur in isolation. The Middle East is not a region where one state can acquire nuclear weapons while others passively accept the new balance of power. Saudi Arabia has already signaled that it would pursue nuclear capabilities if Iran crosses the threshold. Turkey and Egypt would face similar strategic pressures. The result would not be a single new nuclear power, but the beginning of a multi-state nuclear arms race in the most volatile region of the world.

For the Iranian regime, which is obsessed with exporting its “revolution” at all costs, that umbrella would extend over an already expansive network of regional influence. And that matters because Iran has been, by far, the most destabilizing force in the Middle East and North Africa, incessantly gloating about its “ring of fire.”

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has effectively captured large portions of the state while building one of the largest missile arsenals in the world. In Iraq, Iranian-backed militias exert enormous influence over the political system and routinely target Western forces. In Syria, Iran played a decisive role in sustaining Bashar al-Assad’s regime during a brutal civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.

In Yemen, Iranian support for the Houthis has prolonged a devastating conflict and enabled attacks on international shipping lanes in the Red Sea. In Gaza and the West Bank, Iranian backing for militant groups fuels cycles of violence and undermines any fragile hopes for coexistence and stability.

Across the region, the pattern is the same: militia warfare, death and destruction, jailing and murdering dissidents, mass-murdering protesters in the streets, weakened states, and chronic instability. Now imagine that entire network operating under the protection of nuclear weapons.

This is not merely a theoretical concern. The world has already witnessed what happens when the international community allows a hostile regime to cross the nuclear threshold: North Korea. For decades, negotiations, delays, and half-measures allowed Pyongyang to steadily advance its nuclear program. Each diplomatic cycle bought the regime more time. Each round of talks produced promises that were either partially implemented or quietly abandoned.

The uncomfortable truth is that time often benefits the proliferator, not the negotiator. Every month that passes allows centrifuges to spin, stockpiles to grow, and technical knowledge to accumulate. Diplomacy without enforcement can become a mechanism for buying time, not for preventing proliferation. North Korea perfected this strategy over decades of negotiations and eventually crossed the threshold to becoming a nuclear-armed state.

Today, nearly every serious observer agrees that allowing this outcome was a strategic failure. North Korea now possesses nuclear weapons and increasingly sophisticated delivery systems. The regime periodically threatens its neighbors and uses its nuclear arsenal as a shield for aggressive behavior and coercive diplomacy. Once that threshold was crossed, the range of options available to the international community shrank dramatically. And that is the lesson many critics seem strangely unwilling to confront.

If we are going to talk about learning from mistakes, the conversation cannot stop at Iraq and Afghanistan. We must also talk about North Korea. Allowing a hostile regime to acquire nuclear weapons is itself a catastrophic mistake — one that permanently alters the strategic landscape. You cannot make the same mistake twice.

If the lesson of Iraq is that intelligence and strategy must be rigorous, careful, and grounded in reality, the lesson of North Korea is that waiting too long can create a far more dangerous problem.

And Iran is not North Korea; it is far worse. North Korea is geographically isolated and largely contained. Iran sits at the center of the Middle East, connected to multiple theaters of conflict and surrounded by vital global trade routes. It already directs a network of proxy militias that stretches from Lebanon to Yemen. If such a regime were to acquire nuclear weapons, the consequences would not be confined to a single peninsula. They would reverberate across the entire world.

The point of learning from history is not to freeze in fear of repeating past mistakes. It is to recognize patterns early enough to prevent new ones. Failure becomes valuable when it sharpens judgment.

The key strategic distinction is between mistakes that can be corrected and mistakes that cannot. Wars can end. Strategies can change. Governments can revise policies. But once a hostile regime crosses the nuclear threshold, that reality cannot easily be reversed. Nuclear proliferation is not a temporary mistake. It is a permanent shift in the balance of power, one the free world cannot afford.

Anyone who understands the Islamic Republic of Iran and its ideology knows that it’s the kind of regime the free world once vowed never to tolerate again. Like Nazi Germany, it is built on an ideological hatred that is not merely rhetorical but institutionalized — taught in schools, broadcast through state media, repeated by political and religious leaders, and spread across the world, literally.

Many suspect that the Islamic Republic was behind the Bondi Beach Chanukah massacre in Australia in December. We also know, definitively, that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was responsible for at least two antisemitic arson attacks on Jewish sites in Australia last year, prompting Australia to expel Iran’s ambassador.

The comparison to the 1930s is not made lightly, and it is not just a Jewish comparison, but the parallels are difficult to ignore: a regime driven by absolutist ideology, animated by eliminationist rhetoric, and determined to reshape the world through intimidation, terror, and the pursuit of devastating weapons. History’s clearest lesson is that when regimes openly declare genocidal intentions, the international community cannot treat those threats as mere rhetoric or diplomatic disputes.

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